WieMod - reusable simulation models for the virtual product development

Project description

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In today’s industry, simulation is not often integrated into the workflow of interdisciplinary product development. Many domains, e.g. multi-body systems, electronic systems and finite element systems, use only discipline-specific, customized simulation runtime environment for verification.

In the conventional sequential development process, every field of expertise has their own sets of test tools and executes them to evaluate factors within their own scopes, without fully considering the influence of the other fields involved. The new engineering methods are now trying to enhance the quality of the development phase by combining and verifying the interdisciplinary aspects at an earlier stage.

In the WieMod project, methods for simulative verification of discipline-specific partial results, as well as, of scalable mechatronic models were researched. The goal of this project was to enable an economically sound application of the simulation technology, which will support interdisciplinary development of mechatronic systems, without using several discipline-specific simulation tools. Focus of the project is the interface between the building-block based engineering methods and the discipline-specific simulation tools.

Avoiding model inconsistency, data exchange among various runtime environments are required. But because of missing standardized interfaces, the exchange of simulation models between runtime environments is in most cases very expensive. Hence the cost reduction in model development was one of the main objectives of WieMod.

The development process influences the reusability of simulation models. To strengthen the model reuse, the applied modelling approaches were analyzed and a common process was developed. The applicability of this process was proved in this project.

Reusing models is a favourable method to reduce the development efforts in simulation. To highlight their common data structure, existing models have to be analysed. From this structure a runtime environment independent (rim) model was developed. Furthermore an automatic transformation was evolved, which was generate a runtime environment specific model.

Last but not least, a model library storing the generated models was specified and its application was developed. Using model libraries, users can acquire methods to structure or classify models. Also a standardized presentation of model information was provided to recover models. A prototype of a solution was delivered at the end of this project.